


Never Fret None

by JetpackingPenguin



Category: Amar a Muerte (TV)
Genre: F/F, Fluff and Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-04-20
Packaged: 2020-01-23 00:18:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18538432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JetpackingPenguin/pseuds/JetpackingPenguin
Summary: Juliana was a runner, never settling in one place for too long. Until now.AKA: Juliana and Valentina have a much needed conversation.





	Never Fret None

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first Juliantina fic. I had Eye of the Tiger on repeat to hype myself up while writing this. I haven’t written in a long time because of depression/writer’s block. Juliantina pulled me out of my depression, let’s see if they’ll pull me out of the writer’s block too. At heart I’m a deeply needy writer, so tell me what you liked, didn’t like, and what I can improve upon.

Val likes to read. She absorbs books, writes in the margins, and puts sticky notes where the margins aren’t enough. She obsessed over it, like with Camilo’s book, mentioning it everywhere and in everything. Focused on her obsessions.

Val was a dreamer and a thinker. Juliana isn’t like Val.

Juliana is a runner. Juliana left whenever Chino arrived home, slurring his words and waving around a bottle, knowing the sight of her would only make him madder. She ran around the trailer park, past the other trailers and the overgrown lots sitting vacant save for the trash and empty bottles littering the plots. Back in San Antonio, where it was a struggle just to live every day, her talents went unnurtured. She couldn’t afford the shoes for track, much less the travel expenses of a team. So she ran in her free time, unnoticed and unacknowledged. She got good at it. And the habit stuck long after Chino’s execution and subsequent transmigration.

She still runs, even though her circumstances have changed. She went for morning runs around the sprawling Carvajal grounds, separate from the rest of the word and a full three bus rides away from the city center. She needed to run, needed to move after waking up another night from dreams still smelling the pungent stench gasoline — the paralyzing sensation of being tied down and waiting for searing pain, for her immolation.

Juliana pushed open the heavy door to the house, the sweat cooling on her skin. The temperature controlled air of the large house washed over her, removed from the Mexican heat outside.

“Val,” she called, voice carrying in the empty house. “I’m back.”

Val didn’t answer back, but it was a large house. Unworried, she made her way up the stairs towards Val’s room, stretching as she went. With Guille and Renata gone, and Chivis on vacation, the house was just theirs, but she didn’t feel comfortable going into the rooms by herself. Only Val’s room felt safe, like she belonged there, instead of out of place in the expensive setting below.

The door to Val’s room was half open, and Juliana saw long, light brown hair. Juliana’s heart stuttered like it always did upon seeing Val. The girl in question was sitting on her bed, phone face up on the mattress beside her. Every few seconds the screen would light up as a new notification hit.

“Hey.” Juliana entered the room. Val spun on the bed to face the door, almost knocking over a bottle Juliana hadn’t noticed earlier.

“ _Mi amor_!” Val’s face lit up, smiling, so wide her nose scrunched and a dimple appeared on her cheekbone. “Mezcalito?” Val asked, holding a slender bottle in one hand and a shot glass in the other. She shook her hand, and the clear liquid sloshed around inside the half-empty bottle. Her phone lit up beside her again.

Val didn’t drink as much as she used to, and promised she wouldn’t drink so much. She whispered it against Juliana’s skin the first night after Guille left. But sometimes the pressure of everything grew too much. Lucía dying. Her guilt over Lucho. Her father living in El Chino’s body. Eva’s arrest and sentencing. She said the anxiety rose like water in her lungs and she needed a lifeline to keep her afloat.

“No,” Juliana answered quickly, stomach dropping down to her toes. Juliana never wanted to drink again, could feel the bile rising in her throat at the thought. “It’s early to start drinking,” she said cautiously.

“It’s fine,” Val assured, “ _En serio_ , Juls.” She started to laugh, but it didn’t sound happy. “You didn’t have a problem drinking with Sergio,” Val said under her breath, the previous shots loosening her tongue enough for the words to tumble out. Her blue eyes widened. “I- I’m sorry. _Perdón_.”

In the excitement of getting back together, in walking out of that TV studio hand-in-hand, they hadn’t talked about _it_. Not any more than they had in Val’s room that first day. They tiptoed around it, but it lingered in the quiet moments — an unspoken weight in the room.

“That was a stupid thing to say. I’m sorry.”

They needed to talk about this, Juliana knew that they needed to talk about this, and that Val needed to hear her use her words, like a healthy couple, but she couldn’t imagine something she wanted to do less. She tried that first day, but couldn’t, then it was Lucho’s funeral and the moment was lost. Her hands started to shake, and Val’s workout clothes felt too tight all of a sudden. She needed to get away.

“I’m going to shower,” Juliana said, looking away from Val’s blue eyes, glassy from the shots. She scooped up her clothes from earlier off the dresser and hurried into the adjoining bathroom. She rested against the closed door. _Tranquila_ , Juliana scolded herself, breathing deeply and holding it until her lungs felt like bursting. She exhaled loudly. Shaking herself, she started the water.

The water burned her skin, a little too hot for comfort, but she stood underneath the blast. It felt like self-flagellation, a sort of absolution and punishment in equal measure. It reminded her of her first shower after her kidnapping. The water was near boiling then as she tried to scrub her skin clean of the gasoline and the bruises from where Alacrán and his men grabbed her, hit her. She stayed until the water ran cold, and even then she hadn’t felt clean, could still feel the press of Alacrán’s body behind her, could see him and hear him call her “fresh meat.”

She shuddered at the memory again, despite the temperature of the water. She took her feelings about her kidnapping and put them in a box, locking them away into the recesses of her mind. She didn’t want to think about it. She was safe and it was over. He was dead.

She finished bathing; dressing while the body was still damp, the clothing sticking to her uncomfortably as the steam swirled in the air around her. When she came out, a contrite Val sat on the bed, the bottle of Mezcal gone. Val stood up, already speaking fast.

“I’m sorry, Juliana. I didn’t mean what it sounded like,” she rushed, quick to restore their status quo, scared to break the peace they fought everyone for. “I know I say a lot of _pendejadas_. I only meant to joke, and I know - we weren’t together - I would never hold what happened against you.” Val was rambling. “You can drink with whoever you want.”

“Val, no,” Juliana said. That wasn’t the issue. Her tongue felt stupidly heavy in her mouth. “I didn’t want to-” she broke off, sentence stuttering and dying in her chest. She huffed, turning her head and annoyed with herself. “I didn’t plan on drinking with Sergio.”

She stood uncomfortably in front of the bathroom door, feeling a creeping chill despite the heat radiating from her skin. Valentina looked at her tentatively, sitting down once again and patting the space next to her on the bed, with a clear invitation to join her. Juliana stiffly walked over, feeling like Frankenstein’s monster, sitting on the edge of the bed.

“We don’t have to talk about it,” Val said. She looked fearful, insecure, and Juliana never wanted to see her like that, never wanted to be the cause of these negative feelings. Even from that first day, after their kiss, Val was the one who wanted to talk. She was brave with her feelings, and she deserved a proper explanation.

She shook her head. “We need to talk about it.” Juliana blew out a breath, sending strands of hair away from her face. “It’s not what you think.”

Juliana paused again, realizing how that sounded.

“Sergio wanted to talk,” Juliana began, haltingly, the words coming out stilted. “I had nowhere to go. I wasn’t going to drink. We were going to talk, and he brought Mezcal. Then Sergio said some things and-” she trailed off again.

She just wanted to silence all of it: all the self-doubt and the crushing, sinking feeling of the _inevitability_ of Val and Lucho — if not today, then some day soon, especially if she moved to Costa Rica. Sergio’s words were twisting in her head, words like _manipulative_ and everything else he’d ever said about Val. It sunk in like claws inside her brain. The drinking didn’t silence them, merely made them louder, echoing around in her skull until she needed to silence them with action.

Juliana was about action. The movement in her fingers as she sowed, the movement of her pencil on paper as she sketched. Words got stuck in her throat and died on her tongue when she needed them most. Like now. Like they had after she ran away from the Carvajal house after seeing Lucho with his arm around Valentina. She was a doer, running around the trailer park to escape her _Sicario_ father, running from her feelings after her first kiss with Val in the pool — always in motion, never stopping, never settling.

Valentina’s face twisted, the apprehension fading away with that look of single-minded concentration that was uniquely _Valentina_. No one ever looked at her like Val did, like she was the only thing in the room.

“What did he say?” Val asked softly. Her mouth settled into a frown, her tongue pressed against the inside of her cheek.

Juliana shook her head, unwilling to repeat it. It wasn’t true and she shouldn’t have listened. Shouldn’t have believed and let the words claw inside her mind until she tried to prove to herself, to Sergio, that she- what? Wasn’t gay? Wasn’t in love with Val? She didn’t even _know_ what she was trying to prove with Sergio. She hated it. She’d hated it. The alcohol only numbed her so much. It couldn’t change Sergio into someone else. It left her with twin coiling of shame and disgust twisting in her stomach until she wanted to exist outside her skin. She didn’t want to think about her time with Sergio. She didn’t want to think about the lingering feelings of shame and guilt and disgust twisted inside, of betrayal.

“I felt alone,” she confessed.

She tried adopting Val’s coping mechanism as her own, tried to see what Chino found so appealing in the bottom of a bottle. Instead, the drinking made her vulnerable, malleable to persuasion, and she wouldn’t make that mistake again. She was overwhelmed, unable to run because where could she run? She didn’t have a home. Didn’t have Lupe. Wouldn’t have Val. The image of Lucho’s arm around her shoulders haunted her along with Sergio’s words, and she took another shot.

“Sergio said I could experiment with him,” Juliana’s face twisted, disgust creeping into her voice. “After my mom, and then Sergio I just-” she broke off.

Val’s features softened as if she could see what was happening inside Juliana’s head, and Juliana _hated it_. She wasn’t a child. She made a choice. No one forced her.

“I felt guilty afterwards,” she admitted for the first time. “But I didn’t do it because I have feelings for Sergio, or somehow wanted to do things with him and not you.”

“You don’t have to justify yourself to me,” Valentina said. Her voice lowered. “I’m sorry you felt that way.”

Juliana looked down, feeling emotion burning in her eyes.

“Sergio shouldn’t have said anything to you, he shouldn’t have done anything,” Valentina burst out, her lips pursed again, tongue once again pushing against the inside of her cheek. Juliana reached over to grab her hand, freeing her grip on the bottom of her shirt

“ _Tranquila_ , Val,” Juliana soothed.

Val’s face twisted again, looking like she wanted to argue but staying silent. A low anger simmered in her eyes, but it wasn’t directed at Juliana, but _Sergio_. Juliana didn’t want that either, didn’t mean to deflect blame onto Sergio.

“Why were you drinking?” she asked, steering the conversation away from herself, back onto Valentina.

“I only meant to have one drink,” Val said, looking down, “but then one turned into two. I’m sorry.” She rubbed at her eyes, and looked exhausted in that moment. “Forgive me, Juliana.”

“I want to help,” Juliana said. “I don’t have a pie, but your problems are as important as mine,” she said, teasingly.

Valentina’s head dropped as a smile stretched over her face. She tilted into Juliana, head falling briefly against her shoulder.

“What happened?” Juliana asked.

“A magazine came out.” Valentina pulled her phone, unlocking it and scrolling down, clicking on a notification. An article popped up. _Valentina Carvajal’s College Experiment!_

Below was a picture of Juliana and Valentina, blurry like it was taken from a long distance, holding hands as they walked from Valentina’s campus together.

“They’re trying to twist the most beautiful thing in my life into something else,” Val huffed. “They sound like Eva and I’m so tired,” she confessed. Her shoulders drooped. Juliana frowned.

“Hey,” Juliana reached over, combing away the long strands of light brown hair falling in front of her face, squeezing her hand tighter. “It’s only words. What we feel is real. This is real,” she said, pulling their joined hands to her chest. She wanted to say _what they say doesn’t matter_ , but didn’t want to minimize what Valentina was feeling.

“After all we’ve been through, it shouldn’t bother me,” Val said. “I overreacted.”

Valentina twisted her body, contorting until she was almost sitting in Juliana’s lap, her nose pressed against Juliana’s neck. “Val,” Juliana said laughing.

“I’m sorry,” she said, her breath puffing hotly against Juliana’s neck, sending goose bumps up her body. “I haven’t forgotten what you said,” she muttered.

“I know.”

Val nuzzled into her neck again. “ _Te quiero mucho_. I never want you to feel like that again. No one should make you feel like that. What Sergio did was wrong. You know that?” she pulled back to look at Juliana in the eyes.

“Val,” Juliana looked away. Valentina moved her hands to grasp both sides of Juliana’s face, forcing eye contact.

“It was wrong of him, even if you can’t see it.” She rubbed her thumbs against Juliana’s face. Her eyes pierced into Juliana’s, sharp and clear like the bottom of a crystal blue lake. She closed the gap between them, kissing Juliana gently. She pulled away, with a tender expression on her face. Her heart squeezed inside her chest. Juliana leaned forward, kissing her again.

Juliana was a runner, but in this moment, she wanted to stay still.

**Author's Note:**

> I had a hard time coming up with a title and summary. This is unbeta'd, so please let me know what you think. I crave validation.


End file.
